It's been forever and a day since I did anything even approaching a normal update. That is, not including a quote from somewhere or other, or vaguely mentioning something that's not really relevant beyond noting it for posterity.

So. What have I been up to?

( Blah blah essays blah )

I should be writing an essay but instead I am just reading poetry, drenched in the sunshine.

In a lecture on irony yesterday, the lecturer first used an example from 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. She asked if we were familiar with the text, and a few cursory hands were raised. Her next example for analysis was 'My Last Duchess' by Robert Browning. She again asked if anyone was familiar with it. Three quarters of the lecture ( Read more... )

Watching Obama's inauguration set my mind wandering back to London, to my A-level History classroom of two years ago, to Miss Richards and her scrutiny of African American civil rights from 1865 to 1980. I thought of her, small Welsh bundle of energy that she is, with friends or colleagues watching the historic moment. In the same way, during Obama ( Read more... )

My life in Nottingham, though now in an actual house rather than on campus, remains something of a bubble. I've obviously been aware that the economy is in recession, yet I didn't really *know* it until returning to London today. Family friends are being made redundant; my sister has lost her Saturday job; the shopping centres are quiet and shops ( Read more... )

Today I rose relatively early and took a few hours to myself. I walked to campus with a housemate, as we had a lecture on 'Modernism and the Short Story'. Afterwards I popped into the library to check some information in a book I took out last week and bumped into about three friends. On the way home I made the mistake of trying to take a shortcut ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I saw Peter Handke's 'Offending the Audience' at the theatre on campus:

"The Austrian playwright Peter Handke's 1966 play Offending the Audience isn't a play. The actors do not play characters. The stage does not represent some other place. The time of the action does not unfold as though it were some fictional time. Time passes as it ( Read more... )

Sir Richard Eyre guest lectured at my university today. I can inform you all that the blogosphere terrifies him.

I still don't have any internet in my house, although the wireless router arrived today. Hopefully it should be up and running by Thursday and I shall return to cyberspace.

"Alas! 'Frailty thy name is Genius!' What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity? It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion"

From ( Read more... )

Whilst sitting in a lecture about Oedipus Rex this morning, I observed that a girl sitting a few rows ahead of me was wearing a top with a distinctive pattern on it. To be precise, I thought "that pattern looks like the phospholipid bilayer of a cell surface membrane." The word geek comes to mind.

In other news, ♫ I can't concentrate on anything ( Read more... )